Elementary Statistics 9th Edition Weiss Solutions Manual

Elementary Statistics 9th Edition Weiss Solutions Manual

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 Here we are still on the rim of the forest. The white may-trees, still in
flower, grow in rounds and rings together on the broken ground studded with
silver birch. They stand in the dusky summer stillness, very fair and sweet,
their muslin skirt spread white under the gleam of the rising moon. The
lanky sentimental young silver birches bend their heads above them, and
sigh in the breeze. We pass—and as soon as we have passed, no doubt, they
clasp their fragrant partners to their glittering breasts and whirl away in some
mystic, pastoral May-dance to celebrate the spring.
But we go on, still on. The trees press closer and closer. They are now
great forest-trees. The wind soughs among them in utter melancholy. Far
away, here and there, a thin spectre of moonlight glides between their
branches. Have you ever felt at night in some deep glade the holy horror of
the forest? If not, you have no Druid and no Dryad among your ancestry.
You have never known with a shudder just how they sacrificed the victim on
yonder smooth grey slab, by moonlight, to the Forest God! Think, on this
very spot, the moonlight fell, even as it falls to-night, among the gleaming
beeches, ere ever the Romans entered Gaul. Man has never sown or reaped
his harvest on this sacred soil: it is still consecrate to the God of Forests. The
beech-boughs rustle immemorial secrets; the oaks shoot up their mast-like
columns to support the temple roof. And there is Something in the temple,
Something vast and nameless. Something that sighs and laments and chills,
super-human or anti-human, Something which has no place in any of our
creeds. What is it, this obscure, religious dread, this freezing of the blood
and tension of the spirit, that locks us in a holy awe amid the shades of the
nocturnal forest? Who knows? Perhaps a dim unconscious memory of the
rites of our ancestors, Celts or Germans; a drop of the heart’s blood of the
Druid or the Alruna-woman, still alive in us after two thousand years. They
say that children fear the dark because they are still haunted by the dread of
prowling beasts; our babies long obscurely for the blazing camp-fires which
kept the wolves and bears at bay; an old anxious forest-fear survives in them
and forbids them to sleep without that bright protection. Brr!... I wish we
could see the friendly glow to-night in the wood of Compiègne!
At last, far off, there is in truth a glow as of a human beacon. ’Tis a
blacksmith’s forge, and then some straggling houses. Again a space of
scantier wood, and we clatter up the streets of the outlying faubourg. The
streets grow steeper, the houses taller, our pace quicker and more
exhilarating. And at last we draw up with a clack of the whip before the
famous friendly Hôtel de la Cloche at Compiègne.

V
The market is in full swing when we throw our shutters open in the
morning, and the gay wide square is full of booths and country-people,
clustered round the bronze statue of Joan of Arc. (It was here, you know, we
took her—worse luck to us!—at the gate of Compiègne. But it was at Rouen
she made her entry, and that exit for which, alas! we stand ashamed
throughout history.) Nothing could look cheerfuller than the market-place
this morning. It tempts us out; and then we find that we could not see the
best of it from the windows. For cheek by jowl with our hotel stands the fine
Hôtel de Ville, with its fretted, Flemish-looking front and its tall belfry for
the chimes. It was finished in 1510, when Louis XII. was king. There he
rides, on the large arcade on the first story, every inch a king; but the statue
is modern.
Gay, bright, with charming environs, Compiègne is a pleasant county
town; but it has not that look of age, of historic continuity, which are the
charm of smaller places, such as Crépy and Senlis. No sign is left of the
great palace of the Merovingian kings, no relic of that stalwart fortress
whence are dated so many of the acts of Charles the Wise; that castle of
Compiègne where, says Eustache Deschamps, “Tel froid y fait en yver que
c’est raige,” built against the river bridge—
“Le Chastel que se lance
Dessus Aysne, lez le pont du rivaige.”

Bit by bit one discovers, lost in the modern prosperity of the place, here
and there a souvenir of the more illustrious past. Here and there, on the
limits of the town, a towered wall rises in some private garden, and we
recognize a fragment
 VIEUX MOULIN

of the fortifications raised under Joan of Arc. Certain roads in the forest were
planned and laid out by Francis the First. Then there is the city gate, built by
Philibert Delorme in 1552, with the initials of Henry and Diana interlaced. A
few old houses still remain from the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries,
and among them that “Hôtel des Rats” where Henri IV. lived with Gabrielle
d’Estrées in 1591. There are one or two old churches, too much restored.
And then, of course, there is the great uninteresting palace, the very twin of
the Palais Royal, which Gabriel built for Louis XV., and which we
remember for the sake of the two Napoleons.
The charm, the attraction, of Compiègne is elsewhere. The forest here is
beautiful as Fontainebleau. True, here are none of the wild romantic deserts,
the piled crags hoary with juniper, the narrow gorges, and sudden summer
vistas of Fontainebleau. The trees themselves have a different character. We
find few of those great gnarled and hollow giants whose twisted arms make
such uncanny shadows towards sunset in the Bas-Bréau. Here the oaks shoot
up to an inconceivable height erect and branchless until they meet at last in a
roof of verdure just tinged with April rose and gold. If Fontainebleau
reminds us of a comedy of Shakespeare’s, Compiègne has the noble and
ordered beauty, the heroic sentiment of Racine. What solemn arches and
avenues of beeches; what depths of forest widening into unexpected valleys,
rippling in meadow-grass, where the hamlet clusters round its ruined abbey;
what magical lakes and waters interchained, where the wooded hills shine
bright in doubled beauty! Ah! Fontainebleau, after all, is a blind poet: the
forest is ignorant of lake and river. But Compiègne has the Oise and the
Aisne and the Automne. Compiègne has its lakes and tarns, and pools
innumerable, its seven and twenty limpid brooks, its wells and ripples in
every valley-bottom. The loose soil, rich with this continual irrigation, teems
with flowers. The seal of Solomon waves above the hosts of lily of the
valley. The wood-strawberry and wild anemone enamel the grass with their
pale stars. Here and there on the sandier slopes a deep carpet of bluebells, or
at the water’s edge a brilliant embroidery of kingcups, give point to the
sweet monotony of white and green, which vibrates from the flowers in the
grass to the flowering may-bushes, to the acacias only half in blossom, and
thence more faintly to the lady birch and beech with gleaming trunks and
delicate foliage. White and green appear again in the wide sheets of water
amid the shimmering woods. So I shall always think of the wood of
Compiègne as of some paradise, too perfect for violent hue and passionate
colour—some Eden haunted only by the souls of virgins, sweet with all fresh
pure scents, white with white flowers, and green with the delicate trembling
green of April leaves.

VI
Where shall we go to-day? There are many lovely drives in the forest.
Champlieu has its Roman camp, its antique theatre and temple; Morienval its
abbey church with the three Norman towers, St. Nicolas its priory, St. Pierre
its ruins, St. Jean its marvellous old trees, and Ste. Perrine its lakes where the
deer come to die. Shall I confess that we know these beauties still by rumour
only? For we went first of all by the foot of Mont St. Mard to the hamlet of
the old mill, and round the lakes of La Rouillie to Pierrefonds. And on the
morrow, when we set out for Champlieu or St. Jean, after the first mile, we
would cry to the driver, “Go back, and take us the same drive as yesterday.”
And so three times we drove past the Vieux Moulin.
 This is a sad confession. But, reader, if ever you visit Compiègne, go last
to Pierrefonds, round by the Vieux Moulin, or, however long you stay, you
will never see the rest.

VII
Let us set out again for the Vieux Moulin! We are soon deep in woods of
oak and beech. We pass the stately avenues of the Beaux Monts; a steeper
height towers above us. See, how wonderful is this deep-green glen, where
the oaks rise sheer a hundred feet and more from the sheet of lily of the
valley at their feet! The picturesque declivity of the dell, the beautiful
growth of the trees, the whiteness and sweetness and profusion of the
flowers, the something delicate, lofty, and serious about this landscape,
makes a rare impression amid the opulence of April. Our glade slopes
downward from the base of Mont St. Mard; at its further extremity begins
the valley of the Vieux Moulin.
It is a valley of meadow land beside a stream which, a thousand years
ago, must have cut the shallow gorge in which it lies. On either side rises a
line of hills, not high, but steep and wooded. There is just room in the valley
for the small Alpine-looking hamlet and its hay-meadows. They are full of
flowers; marsh-flowers down by the stream, with higher up, sheets of blue
sage and yellow cowslip, and here and there a taller meadow-orchid.
Somewhere among the flowers, out of sight, but never out of hearing, runs
the stream that feeds the mill, the Ru de Berne.
The hamlet is clustered at the nearer end—perhaps a hundred dark little
houses, irregularly grouped round an odd little church with a wide hospitable
verandah, all the way round it, and a quaint balconied spire. The houses are
gay with climbing roses—out in flower, to my astonishment, on this 28th of
April; and in their little gardens the peonies are pink and crimson. It has
quite the look of a Swiss hamlet; and, if you choose, there is an “ascension”
to be made! True, the Mont St. Mard can be climbed in some three-quarters
of an hour; but none the less its summit boasts a matchless view. See, all the
forest at our feet, with its abbeys and hamlets, and lakes and rivers, out to the
blue plains streaked with woods, where Noyon and Soissons emerge like
jewels circled in an azure setting. The view is quite as beautiful if we keep to
the valley. The meadows grow lusher and sedgier, and the kingcup gives
place to the bulrush, and the bulrush to the water-lily, till, behold, our
meadows have changed into a lake, a chain of winding waters, in which the
wooded hills are brightly mirrored. The road winds on between the wood
and the water till we reach a long, slow, mild ascent, and at the top of it we
find ourselves upon the outskirts of a little town. A sudden turn of the road
reveals the picturesque village, scattered over several roundly swelling hills,
but clustered thickliest round an abrupt and wooded cliff, steeper than the
others, and surmounted by a huge mediæval fortress, one frown of
battlements, turrets, and watch-towers behind its tremendous walls. Below
the castle and the rock, and in the depth of the valley, lies a tiny lake, quite
round, girdled with quinconces and alleys of clipped lime. Far away, beyond
the hills, on every side, the deep-blue forest hems us in. Except Clisson in
Vendée, I can think of no little town so picturesque, so almost theatric in the
perfection of its mise en scène. And see, the castle is quite perfect, without a
scar, without a ruin! Was the wood, after all, an enchanted wood, as it
seemed? Have we driven back five hundred years, into the Valois of the
fourteenth century?

VIII
Pierrefonds! It was here that a sad ne’er-do-weel (for whom I have a
liking none the less) built himself this famous castle in 1391. It was the
wonder of the age, too strong and too near Paris for the safety of the Crown.
It was dismantled in 1617; and all that remains of the fourteenth-century
fortress is, with the foundations, one side of the keep and part of the outer
wall. Its restoration, begun in 1858, was the triumph of Viollet-le-Duc.
Before the decoration was finished, before the last moats were dry, or the
palisade laid out, the Second Empire fell; the munificent patron became an
invalid in exile, and Pierrefonds was dubbed a national monument, kept
from ruin, but no longer an occasion for expense. I own that I should like to
have seen it before it was restored—to have seen the real, time-stained,
historical document. Yet, after all, the world has a goodly harvest of ruins, of
documents; and there is only one such magnificent historical novel as the
Castle of Pierrefonds.
The decoration is often poor and gaudy; but architecturally Pierrefonds is
a work of genius. To walk through it is to see the Middle Ages alive, and as
they were: a hundred phrases of mediæval novels or poems throng our
memory. See, there is the great Justice Hall, built separate from the keep,
above the Salle des Gardes; and there, connecting it with the outer defences,
are the galleries or loggie, where the knights and ladies used to meet and
watch the Palm Play in the court below. Here is the keep, a fortress within a
fortress, with its postern on the open country. From its watch-towers, or its
double row of battlements, we can study the whole system of mediæval
defence. Ah, this would be the place to read some particularly exciting book
of Froissart’s—“The Campaign in Brittany,” for instance, or one of those
great Gascon sieges, full of histories of mining and counter-mining, of
sudden sallies from the postern gate, of great engines built like towers,
launching stones and Greek fire, which the enemy wheels by night against
the castle wall. I am deep in mediæval strategy when a timid common-
sensible voice interrupts—
“Mais comment cela se peut-il que le château soit si ancien, p’isque vous
me dites qu’il fut construit sous le Second Empire?”
’Tis our fellow-sightseer, apparently some local tradesman, bent on
holiday, tramping the forest with his wife, their dinner in a basket, and
bunches of muguets dangling from their wrists. He is a shrewd little fellow.
In his one phrase, he has summed up the sovereign objection to Pierrefonds
—
“How can the castle be so ancient if, as you say, ’twas built under
Napoleon III.?”
Decidedly Pierrefonds is too well restored!

IX
The castle is the chief interest at Pierrefonds, but not the only one; for,
down by the lake, on the overgrown and weedy promenade, there stands the
Établissement des Bains. Here tepid sulphur springs are captured and turned
to healing uses. Happy sick people, who are sent to get well in this
enchanting village! How they must gossip in the lime-walk and fish in the
lake, read on the castle terraces,
 THE LAKES OF LA ROUILLIE

and wander in the forest! Happy sick people; for, alas! (unless one stand in
need of sulphur baths) Pierrefonds, in its lovely valley, is not, they say, a
very healthy place. So, at least, from Compiègne, proclaims the trump of
Envy; or perhaps the imparadised Pierrefondois, eager to keep their lovely
home safe from the jerry-builder, have started these vague rumours of
influenza, of languor, of rheumatisms. ’Tis a wise ruse, a weapon of defence
against the Parisian—a sort of sepia shot forth to protect the natural beauty
of the woods against the fate of Asnières.
There are three courses open to the visitor to Pierrefonds. He may stay
there, and that would certainly be the pleasantest course. Or he may take the
train, and after little more than half an hour arrive at Villers-Cotterets, where
he will sleep, reserving for the morrow the lovely drive through the forest to
Vaumoise, and the visit to the quaint old high-lying town of Crépy en Valois,
whence the train will take him on to Paris. Crépy is a dear old town. No one
would think that such a dull disastrous treaty once was signed there. The
road that slopes down from Crépy to the plain is full of a romantic, almost an
Umbrian picturesqueness. We drove there once, years ago, and visited the
knolly forest full of moss and pines. But we have never seen Villers-
Cotterets; for when we were at Pierrefonds we followed the third and worst
course open to us: we drove back to Compiègne, and thence we took the
train direct to Paris.
 P II

1901
N again have I visited Pierrefonds or the woods of Compiègne. They lie
an hour or so from Paris by the rail, but still to me they seem as inaccessible
as fairyland. Sometimes, on a fine morning at Eastertide, a longing goes
through me to start for those tall glades of oak, with the road that runs right
through them to the lovely Vieux Moulin. But, to tell the truth, I have not
dared; I doubt not, at the back of my heart, that village, forest, hill, and lake,
have long since crumbled into ashes.
Years later, it was my fate, however, to return to Chantilly. The time was
midwinter; January wrapped the earth in a shroud of snow and ice. But even
in midwinter there still beats in copse and wold a heart of life too deep and
sound for any frost to touch it. Not a flower, not a leaf, enlivened the forest;
but how large and frequent seemed the forest-birds relieved against that
dazzling steppe! The green woodpeckers, hopping about, two or three of
them together, appeared (although, in fact, not more than fourteen inches
long) as large and bright as parrots. This fine bird, the pivert of France where
it is common, ever excites my admiration, so graceful is its shape, from the
long bill to the slender somewhat drooping tail, so bright is its colouring—a
mantle of moss green, a breast of greenish yellow, some yellow feathers in a
tail of chequered brown and white, and a coif like a jewel, ruby-red, blood-
red, drawn close over head and neck. In England I have never seen him,
though I believe the bird exists with us; nor, though I sometimes find him in
my Cantal orchards, have I ever seen the pivert so much to his advantage as
during that cold week in January, relieved against a vast expanse of snow.
The winter that year was unusually hard. The pools of Commelle were all
fast bound in ice; the snow lay heaped beneath the lacy boughs of the beech
roots twisted on their banks. Silent and deserted stood the castle of Queen
Blanche. On every twig and branch of the woods glittered a spray of
diamond dewdrops frozen hard. Brilliant, still, and white, the great forest
stretched all round us, like an enchanted place where no one lived but we,
until, as we reached the third pool of the chain, we suddenly found that we
were not alone: a company of wild ducks had alighted on the ice, still
disposed, as when they fly, in a long straggling V, and stood shuffling
incessantly their webbed feet as if to warm them on that bitter floor.
One other day, too, I remember. It was warmer; a thaw had set in; a light
white mist enveloped everything. We walked on the common as in a world
of cotton-wool. Suddenly, a few feet away, a pack of hounds, in full cry,
broke out of the moist damp mist; we saw them for a yard or two, and then
the fog engulphed them anew. The bright coats of the piqueurs, in a vision of
horses, kept appearing and disappearing. It was the Duke of Chartres’ meet.
Chantilly is a cheerful place in winter. The Orleans princes, the Barons de
Rothschild, with a bevy of local nobility and gentry, are bent on the
pleasures of the chase. It is a land of races, too. In many a corner of the
woods you may come upon a set of training stables with, hard by, a queer
little sham-Gothic villa, which looks as if it came from Leamington,
emblazoned with its English name—Rose Cottage or Ivy Lodge. In every
lane you come across the pale, stunted English jockeys, pacing their
thoroughbreds. More than once as they rode by, I saw the stalwart peasants
in their blouses glance up with a jest from their work at the saw-mill or the
woodpile, half contemptuous of the jockeys’ wizened youth, half content
that their money should enrich the country-side. And I thought of that long-
forgotten France where, for so many decades, the English lads rode by, slim
and haughty, and the French peasants chuckled “Levez votre queue, levez!”
being persuaded that the English had tails like monkeys, in those sad old
times of the Hundred Years’ War.
On the fourth day the sun rose dazzling. We walked in the taillis where
the wood-cutters were hard at work. The forest of Chantilly is almost all
planted in taillis composé with hornbeam, elm, and oak—three species
which, however often you may fell them, will rise again from the roots,
apparently immortal. Each tree in the coppice as it reaches thirty years is
marked for the axe, with the exception of a reserve, drawn from the finest
subjects, which is permitted to fulfil its natural growth, and affords a
permanent covert for the rest. Such is a taillis composé or taillis sous futaie
—perhaps the most profitable crop that can be drawn from a soil too stiff or
too light for the ordinary purposes of agriculture. The hornbeam and the
beech are the best of all woods for burning; the oak is their rival, and
commands several markets as ship-timber, building-wood, cabinetmaker’s
oak, props for mines, or logs for burning. The leaves, too, are a source of
profit; for dead leaves in France serve almost all the purposes of straw, and
stuff a mattress, or litter a stable, or manure the kitchen garden.
I love these feathery woods and coppices of France. A long, low, cliff-
like hill, with a landslip at the foot; a pasture sloping to the river; a spinny or
taillis in the middle distance:—there is a landscape which you may see on
any day in any part of France; and I ever find it full of a delicate yet homely
grace. But, for beauty and wonder, the haute futaie is incomparably finer
than the copse. In the futaie the trees are left to grow to their natural shape,
the axe serving only to weed out the misshapen trunks, or to eliminate the
intrusive birch and poplar which push unbidden among the better sort. Here,
at least, the oak and beech, adult, with a century and a half behind them, fall
only in their prime, the rich prize of the woodman’s axe, which still respects
the elect reserve. Compiègne, Fontainebleau, St. Germain, have all their
futaies; but few private owners can afford to wait a hundred and fifty years
for their reward (which, indeed, is princely when it comes due), or have so
vast a property that, during more than a century, some part of it may fall
every winter to the axe in due rotation. For who can boast a hundred and
fifty groves, duly planted and tended year after year? Perhaps the State
alone. A third system, much used in parks and woods round houses, as
combining use and ornament, is that of jardinage. Here, as in an earthly
paradise, trees of all ages grow together, and every year the axe takes its toll
of young and old alike: yon great fir may boast two centuries, and here is
yesterday’s sapling at its feet. The fir and the beech are generally grown en
jardinage.
Hark, the sharp tang of the axe! Let us go and see. There is an art in
wood-cutting, especially in felling a taillis; for if the wound be not clear and
sharp, if the least uneven crevice or hollow let the rain sojourn and sodden in
the stump, the root will lose its virtue. But the woodman knows his trade. He
was born in our woods, most likely; if not, ten to one he comes from the
Belgian Ardennes, perhaps from Bavaria: be sure he is a sylvan; mixed with
his blood is the sap of the forest. There, under that spreading oak, he has
built his hut of tree-trunks: long perches of young oaks covered by sods of
earth, with the grass turned inwards. Let us peep in. A pile of dead bracken
occupies one corner. Three stout poles, planted in the beaten earth which
forms the floor, are tied together at the top, and support a great iron soup-
pot, swinging over a fire of braise, under the hole in the roof. There is no
window, hardly a door. Evidently our woodman is a bachelor.
 For in the forest of St. Germains I know another hut which is the very
pride and pink of neatness. The woodman’s wife used to sit there, on a deep
bench of turf built against her rustic house, mending the week’s wash, while
her children played at her feet. The hut itself, though built, as usual, of
trunks and sods, was pleasant to look at, with a neat white-curtained window
in a frame of deal set in the wall of logs; a door of the same pattern swung
on a pole passed through a double set of iron loops. Door and window were
evidently portable, and had been used on many a clearing. Within, a folding
table, a stool or two, and even some canvas folding chairs such as are used in
gardens, gave the rough place a look of comfort. A wide truckle-bed
supported a mattress of sacking, stuffed, no doubt, with forest leaves; a red
blanket covered the whole. A stock-pot simmered above a portable iron
stove. Sometimes the good woman would do her cooking, as she always did
her week’s washing, out-of-doors, and then—ye sylvan deities!—what
savoury fumes would rise from that huge marmite! It was, no doubt (for so
she said), a jay or so, perhaps a squirrel (the peasants here account them
dainty eating), which so tickled our
 PIERREFONDS

appetite in passing. And yet I could have sworn to the aroma of a hare, a
pheasant, some piece of good wild game. Since no trade is warranted to
breed perfection, let me admit that my friends the woodmen are nearly
always past-masters in the noble art of poaching. How should it be
otherwise? Only on Sundays can they tramp to the nearest village to buy,
with their scanty pence, their flitch of bacon and their bag of meal. The cow,
which their children lead to pasture in the glades, affords them milk, but that
is all. And meanwhile the woodland teems with life. So poor, remote from
all society, cognizant of the ways of bird and beast, shall they mark unmoved
the traces of the hare, note with a disinterested eye the break a fawn has
made in yonder brushwood, or that thick splash of mud on the ridgy pine-
trunks, where the wild boar last night stopped to scratch his miry flanks, on
his road to the nearest turnip-field? Meanwhile the man hungers, and the
children need their daily bread.
Who does not remember a charming page of Gustave Droz, which tells
how a young couple, surprised by a thunderstorm in the forest, took shelter
in the charcoal-burner’s hut, and shared their savoury mess? Such luck has
never been mine. It was one of the things for which I envied my revered and
admirable friend, M. Taine, whose childhood, spent on the edge of a great
forest, made him familiar with every sylvan thing.
“In these old forests,” he writes, in an essay on the Ardennes, “there
lingers a race of men still half savage; they are the woodcutters. They
scarcely know the taste of bread; a side of bacon, some potatoes, a little
milk, compose their daily fare. I have spent the night with them in huts
without a window. The large, low, open chimney let in the daylight and let
out the smoke. There the meat was hung to dry. The children spoke scarce a
word of French, expressing themselves in a rude patois; wild as young colts,
they roamed the forest all day long; when they reached their twelfth year,
their father put an axe in their hands, and they chopped the branches of the
fallen trees; a few years later, they felled an oak like him. A mute animal
life, full of legends and strange beliefs, was theirs.”
But all this was sixty years ago. Nowadays the children are supposed to
go, at least sometimes and when convenient, to the nearest village school
(for education is compulsory in France); the young men inevitably serve
their time at the regiment; the girls enter domestic service. And so difficult is
it to find recruits for the woodman’s free but rough and lonely life, that the
lack of woodcutters is becoming a grave question among foresters in France.
When March is well out, and the trees are felled, when the wood is piled
in stacks, the woodman consults the sky, and, on the first soft mild and sappy
morning, he begins to bark his oaks, or at least such of them as are devoted
to that tragic end. It is a nice and delicate business, which must be
undertaken before the leaves are green. For, while the sap is springing, the
bark and the wood are separated by a layer of viscuous vegetable tissue, the
cambium, but so soon as the foliage is full-formed, this cambium turns hard
and welds the two together. Yet the weather must be warm; a blast of cold
wind, the shadow of too black a cloud, by suddenly lowering the
temperature, may at any moment interrupt the operation: the bark will not
strip from the oak. The woodman (who knows nothing of this capricious
cambium, worse than a woman for yielding only at its pleasure) swears that
a herd of sheep must have passed to his windward, and throws down his axe,
well aware, despite his false premises, that no more stripping will be done
that day. He must wait on sun and zephyr. The next warm day he returns,
cuts a sharp ring round the foot of the tree, another at his right arm’s topmost
reach, and rips the bark in long ribbons, which he lays in the sun to dry, face
downward, for a day and a night, ere he stack them for the tanner. That is the
prime bark, flayed from the living trunk; having taken this, he fells the oak,
and strips as best he can the upper branches.
Woodcutter, bark-stripper, he turns planter next, and, where the natural
fruit of the trees has not sufficiently renewed the glade, he hoes the earth,
relieves it from the stifling moss and turf, digs a deep hole, and plants a
sapling. By early autumn he must change his trade anew; in September the
woodman becomes a charcoal-burner. The suns of August have dried last
winter’s logs; they are ready for the next metamorphosis. The woodcutter,
who knows by heart each glade and clearing and coppice of the forest,
selects some open space, far from the century-old revered Reserve, and cuts
the turf from a chosen circle. Having beaten hard the ground, he plants in the
middle three or four stout stakes and swathes them together; round these he
sets some light inflammable brushwood; beyond this centre—which will
serve as a chimney—he places his logs in close rings, standing straight on
end in the middle, then slantwise more and more, till they are almost flat at
the edge. And now the stack takes on the shape of a great flattish cake or pie.
Thereon he packs a layer of dead leaves, four inches thick, and over that
again a layer of sand and sods, till, save for a small open space in the middle,
the whole is tightly roofed. At last he casts a flaming brand into the
brushwood at the core, and waits: in an instant the faggots crackle, the
smoke rises up thick and yellow, the sand and earth of the crust begin to
ooze and “sweat,” as they say, from the sap and moisture of the buried logs.
Now let the woodman look to the wind, lest too strong a blast cause the pile
to burn too quickly, ruin the charcoal, and endanger the forest. If a sudden
gale should rise, he will build a screen of branches and break the force of its
impact; and all this while the fire burns steadily, smoking and sweating, until
—on the third day, as a rule—a faint wreath alone of bluish vapour curls
lightly from the exhausted pile. After a few days more the mound may be
unpacked; if all be well, the charcoal is ready for sale. The sylvan year has
run its course. Our woodman is a woodcutter again.
Forestry in France is not only an art, a science, an industry, and a passion.
Several generations of savants such as M. Bouquet de la Grye—to whom,
with all who love the woods, I owe a debt, here gladly acknowledged—have
reduced the rule of forestry to a method. Thanks to them, the returns are as
sure, the cultivation as regular, as in any other branch of agriculture. If I had
been a man, I would, I think, have been a forester; not a woodman, but an
inspector of woods and waters, like Jean de la Fontaine, riding all day long
under the green and musical covert, among the fresh scents of herb and leaf
and resin, sleeping at night in the forest-warden’s lodge, deciding the
destinies of oak and beech and pine. At Nancy there is an Ecole Forestière,
which forms to this kindly calling the pupils of the Agronomic Institute.
Thence sometimes, or else from Stuttgard, we used to draw our foresters for
the vast woods of India, until, in 1884, a School of Forestry was established
at Cooper’s Hill.
The last years of the nineteenth century, the first of this, have brought the
youth of France back, with a sort of passion, to the land. In Shakespeare’s
time, as we know,
“Young gentlemen in France
Were wont to sigh and look as black as night
From very wantonness.”

I am glad to think that in our days they are at once more cheerful and
more practical. Cheesemaking, cattle-farming, wine-growing, farming,
forestry, are all enterprises which a young gentleman may pursue with credit,
and even with enthusiasm. And forestry, at least, is cultivated as it never was
before. Until the last hundred years, more or less, a forest was just a wood-
mine, to be worked until the vein should be exhausted. But now we sow and
tend even more than we destroy. We are like provident children who seek to
repair the ruin wrought by a generation of prodigals. I have before my eyes
the statistics for the expense which the forests of France have cost the State
between 1882 and 1902: they average some three and a half million of francs
per annum. The foresters of France find such a sum the miserable pension of
a miser, and men of science bid us plough, and plant, and fence in our
hillsides, unless we be prepared to see their rocky flanks ravined by
headlong torrents, and the plains at their feet alternately a quagmire and a
Sahara. The course of rivers, the distribution of rains, the maintenance of
mountains in their magnificent integrity, all depend upon the deep-draining
roots, the rain-absorbing foliage of our woods. The French Revolution, in
order to supply the peasants with a great expanse of arable land, set the axe
in the forests of France. Liancourt wrote in 1802, on his return from exile,
that, all round his estates, the great woods which covered that portion of the
Oise had been cut down or rooted up—an excess of deforestation which had
already produced disastrous effects upon the climate. He preached in the
desert; content with their new fields of corn and beet (astonishingly
productive, like all virgin soil), the peasants of the Oise would not hear of
replanting; where the woods had been merely felled and not uprooted, the
shepherds drove their flocks of sheep and goats, fattening them on the young
shoots which should have renewed the forest. But to-day we are wiser: we
plant. Sandy moors and heaths, desolate stretches of barren chalk, are
planted with the hardy sylvan pine, and shortly become things of use and
beauty in themselves, no less than happy influences on the local climate. The
pine gives deal and resin, and grows in any soil. Clays too stiff and damp for
corn or turnip will rear the glorious and profitable oak; the steepest flanks
and scaurs of the fell-side are sufficient for the beech; the elm and the ash
spring in small spinnies on almost any sterile field, and their leaves afford a
delicious food for cattle, a crop as regular and as nourishing as hay. Any
wood, treated with care and method through a space of years, will yield a
good return for careful husbandry.
And this, I think, is the special beauty of France—her great and
increasing stretches of woodland. Be they the merest coppices of scrub oak
and horn-beam, yet are they haunted by the birds, starred in spring with
primroses and dog-violets, oxlips and white wood-strawberries. And what
tongue shall declare the majesty of the forest? I love the great freedom of the
wild high mountain-pastures, I admire the rich harvest of the lowland plain;
but something deeper and more secret—dating from the days before our
ancestors were nomad shepherds or farmers on a forest-clearing—a thrill
primæval, is awakened in me by the rustle of the woods.
A LITTLE TOUR IN PROVENCE A LITTLE TOUR
IN PROVENCE

1892

O UR first impression of Provence struck us just beyond Mondragon. For

some miles we had traversed the romantic valley of the Rhone, which at
this point might almost be the valley of the Rhine. The river is hedged in
by tall cliffs covered with ruins as steep and as uninhabitable as the granite
which supports them. Every mountain bears its castle and tells of feudal rule,
of brigand oppression, with all the violence and picturesqueness of a
mediæval tale by Sir Walter Scott. The train carried us through a narrow
gully, with barely room in it, above the strangled river, for the ledge on
which the rails are laid. Suddenly, at the other end of the gorge, the climate
changes: the air is milder, the plain more fertile, the country widens into a
great amphitheatre enclosed between the Alps of Dauphiné and the rounder
hills of the Cévennes. And here, with the suddenness of magic, the first
olives begin—no stripling trees, but gnarled and branching orchards,
sunning their ancient limbs on every southern slope. In the twinkling of an
eye we have come into the kingdom of the South. With a deep breath of the
sharp-scented sunny air, we inhale the beauty of it, and understand—how
intimately!—that horror of high mountains which has distinguished every
race capable of appreciating beauty. Our recollection of the black gorge, the
barren peaks, the swirling torrent, renders still keener our feeling for the
fertile plain where the blood-red boughs of the Judas-tree make their deep
southern blots of colour against the blue of the delicate, serrated hills behind.
Among the fields the pollard mulberries gleam like baskets of golden
filigree, in the splendour of their early April leaf. The tall pastures are white
with starry jonquils, bending all one way in the wind. The hedges are sweet
with hawthorn, great southern bloom, almost as big and plump as apple-
blossom. And the same delicious contrast of delicacy and abundance which
strikes us in the plain, surrounded by its peaks and barren hills, is repeated in
the difference between this riot of blossom and the austerity of the foliage,
much less green than in the north. The ilex spreads its cool grey shadow at
the homestead door. Every little red-tiled farm, every vineyard, is screened
by its tall hedge of cypress, a sheer wall of blackish green, planted invariably
north-west of the building. For through those narrow gorges of Mondragon,
where there seemed scarcely room for the train and the river, the Mistral also
passes, like a blast from a giant’s bellows—the Mistral, the terrible north-
western wind, that devastates these plains of Paradise.

II
Our first halting-place is Orange, a white and charming little town, filling
up its ancient girdle with many an ample space of green garden and lush
meadow. Few towns appear more provincial than this charming Orange,
which gave William the Silent to the cause of the Reform, a dynasty to
Holland, and a king to England. There were princes in Orange long before
the Nassau: there was the House of Baux, with its pretensions to the Empire
of the East; there was the House of Adhémar, which brought forth the noble
Guillaume d’Orange, the peer of Charlemagne. Of all their glory naught
remains save one meagre wall, one tumbling buttress surmounting the hill
above the city. Compared with the beautiful amphitheatre beneath, still
important and majestic as in the days of the Roman occupation, these
remains of chivalry appear little more venerable than the ruins of the jerry-
built villas of some demolished London suburb. Yet as we look at them an
emotion awakes in our heart and a mist comes before our eyes that Roman
antiquity does not evoke. For the monuments of the Middle Ages are other
than of stone.
And we remember how, in the beautiful old romance of Guillaume
d’Orange, the unhappy hero comes home to his castle wounded, after
Roncesvalles, the only living knight of all his host, and sounds the horn that
hangs before the castle gate. But the porter will not admit him: none may
enter in the absence of the master, and no man of all his garrison recognizes
the hero in this poor man, suddenly aged and pinched and grey, seated on a
varlet’s nag, with nothing martial in his mien. Their discussion brings the
Countess on to the battlements: “That—my husband! My husband is young
and valiant. My husband would come a conqueror, leading tribes of captives,
covered with glory and honour.” Then, seated still on his poor nag, outside